The Unwind Dystology was by far one of the weirdest things I’ve ever read. It’s a captivating, easy to read series aimed at young adults, but despite that, it’s nowhere near light reading. In this world, abortion is outlawed, but instead parents can ‘unwind’ their children between the ages of 13-18. This means that they ‘continue living’ in a ‘divided state’, as the euphemisms in this book say, but in reality they become glorified organ donors.

It sounds horrible and you wonder how a society could ever have sanctioned this way of life. But the books expertly convince you that things like this could happen, and it even give many, many real world examples of things that you can find in one way or another adapted into this series.

I found this book series because I discovered the author Neal Shusterman about half a year earlier, and really enjoyed the Arc of a Scythe series. His Unwind series seems even more popular, and even though the theme was super duper weird and it took me some time, I eventually just bought the whole series.

Reading the first book, UnWind was very much a WHAT THE FUCK experience. This world is extremely bizarre and weird full of what I’d consider some kind of body horror. Even though the book is not very graphic about it, just the thought of what’s happening was making me incredibly uncomfortable while reading.

One of my issues with the setting was that I found it really hard to believe that parents would willingly have their teenage kids sent off to be harvested. But then again, in such an overpopulated world, I guess people are more inclined to do such horrible things. Also, teenagehood isprobably the most difficult and troublesome phase parents have to go through…

The second book, UnWholly, is a seamless continuation, and once you’ve reached this book, you’re in deep. It was very compelling, I couldn’t put the book down. My only criticism was with some of the characters (Starkey, Dylan), because they seemed a bit one-dimensional and I couldn’t really understand their motivations at all.

The third book, UnSouled, is again just a seamless continuation building up to the conclusion in book four, UnDivided. Altogether, this book series could probably also just have been one giant, very long 1000 page book, and should be treated as a whole.

It’s an incredibly weird experience to read these books. The whole concept of unwinding (basically murdering teenagers to use as organ donors) is so disturbing and outlandish, but what makes it more tangible is the fact that especially in books 3 and 4, the author provides a lot of real world excerpts that show real world parallels, or rather, I assume the things where he got his ideas from. And some of those real world quotes are possibly even more disturbing than what’s happening in the books.

Altogether, the books tell the story of a bunch of characters, most notably Connor, Risa and Lev, who are significant in all of them, and tie all the plots together. Throughout the books we also encounter a whole lot of other characters around them. Altogether, this makes the books really captivating to read, especially since the POV is switched up every now and then. Some are less fun to read (wow I hate Starkey so much), but altogether it’s very well-written. Character development is excellent, and some of these characters are literally unrecognizable by the end and after all they’ve been through.

The books also put a lot of very philosophical questions into the open, and gives you a lot of food for thought on life, death and identity. I like to read books that trigger emotional responses and that make me think, and these books are definitely some that I’ll be thinking about for a long, long time.

The series is followed by a short story collection, UnBound, very similar to the short story collection that Shusterman did for Arc of a Scythe. I didn’t read all the short stories, just the ones that interested me. Some of these give nice closure to the main book series, or add background information that seemed to be missing. For that, it’s a pretty nice collection, but IMHO you can read the series without reading this as well.

To summarize, The Unwind Dystology is a book series that not only kept me hooked, but also gave me a lot to think about for a long time – life, death, spirituality, modern medicine, ancient human sacrifice, modern Frankenstein, and many, many more things.